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The fact that the German city of Munich has been using their own version of Linux and Free/Open Source Software in its municipal day-to-day workings is not news. It’s also no secret that the city of Munich was also saving money in the bargain as well, as the Lord Mayor (yeah, they have those in Munich) reported to the council; a savings of around 4 million euros, by the Lord Mayor’s estimation, according to a March 2012 report.

The problem is that the Lord Mayor was a little off — about 6 million euros off, as a matter of fact.

An article in The H last week reported that the savings to the city of Munich, thanks to its home-grown LiMux Linux operating system and FOSS programs like OpenOffice, have saved with German city 10 million euros.

The article itself breaks down the savings very nicely, and I don’t want to get into the OpenOffice/LibreOffice debate here (though, arguably, they can use LibreOffice just as easily, in my opinion, and they’d be better off doing so).

But what it comes down to is this: If Linux and FOSS can save a city like Munich this much money, how much could it save the cash-strapped cities, counties — heck, even states and this nation — by implementing Linux and FOSS at various government levels? This is not a new question, and I know groups like Code for America get it.

Armed with this information from Munich, it’s probably a good time to ask this question at city council halls far and wide.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)